On Assignment
his could have been JIM
STANFIELD'S last picture. The
veteran GEOGRAPHIC photog
rapher snapped the self-portrait
2,000 feet over Sumatra as he sat in
the gunner's seat of a re-creation of
a 1919 Vickers Vimy bomber, fea
tured in this issue. Moments later
the plane's starboard engine failed.
"I knew we were going down,"
says Jim, "but I wasn't worried. The
pilot, Peter McMillan, really knew
what he was doing. There wasn't a
chance to panic; I was making pic
tures the whole time-until Peter
landed us safely in a rice field."
Making Geographic pictures for
nearly three decades, Jim has cov
ered everything from rats to royalty.
His article on the Vatican (Decem
ber 1985) won kudos from Pope
John Paul II and grew into a book,
now translated into 11 languages.
But is a plane crash part of a day's
work? "Well, I was in a helicopter
crash in New Orleans in 1971; that
was a mess of spewing oil hoses. The
Vimy crash was cleaner."
"The one time I accidentally
touched a Phyllobates terribilisfrog
my finger went numb," recalls
biologist MARK MOFFETT (below, at
right). Both he and assistant Essdras
Suarez wear gloves as poison-dart
maker Paulino Hueso releases a
deadly yellow hopper.
"Lucky for me, skin contact alone
doesn't kill; the frog toxin must
enter your bloodstream through an
abrasion or cut to work." Unlucky
for Mark, a sunburn blistered his
JAMES L. BTANFIEHLU
legs as he dragged his dugout canoe
up Colombia's Saija River. "For a
week I couldn't stand up unassist
ed," he says. "That pain was bad
enough, but the possibility of a
terribilisbumping into my open
sores made me very nervous."
More of Mark's adventures
appear in The High Frontier:
Exploring the TropicalRainforest
Canopy (Harvard University Press).
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